Greetings yokai fans!
Today is a cool, rainy day, which makes it perfect weather for a nocturnal, water yokai. Today’s yokai is the amabie.
I chose this yokai because I’ve already done jinja hime and kudan, and I really like doing yokai that reference each other. It seems that a lot of yokai were spontaneously “discovered” in the mid-1800’s, and all of them had the same advice: “Look at my picture and you won’t catch a disease.” Coincidentally, there were widespread pandemics of cholera and other diseases going around at this time, so it’s not hard to imagine yokai like amabie et al as a sort of psychological response to the fear of these deadly, contagious diseases. Worldwide deaths from the first three cholera epidemics alone topped 15 million! That’s pretty incredible, and it must have wreaked havoc on the national psychology of the countries affected. I imagine that the hope these “good luck” yokai brought must have been a big relief to the poor peasants of the time.
Of course, those three yokai are not the only prognosticating practitioners. Tons of yokai (like baku) have been used as good luck charms against disease. Sometimes the yokai’s picture, or a small charm, or even just the act of writing the yokai’s name was all it took to protect people. While researching amabie and jinja hime, I came across so many copycat yokai… it would be tempting to do them all, but they are so similar it would end up being a long book full of the same story on every page.
In fact, copycat yokai were so popular at the time, that sometimes newspapers got caught publishing fake stories — in one case a paper in Kumamoto published a story about an “arie” (same thing as an amabie basically) that appeared in a local village. The thing was, that village didn’t even exist! So the newspaper had to print a retraction.
Anyway, on to the story!
アマビエ
あまびえ
TRANSLATION: unknown; possibly a misspelling of “amabiko”
HABITAT: oceans
DIET: unknown
APPEARANCE: Amabie is a mermaid-like yōkai with a mixture of human and fish features. It has long hair and a scaly body. It has a beak-like mouth, and three legs. It glows with a bright light that can be seen from the shore. They are auspicious yōkai—keeping a picture of an amabie can protect you from disease.
ORIGIN: Little is known of the amabie’s characteristics. However, its story is very similar to other prophetic yōkai such as jinja hime and kudan, which deliver a prognostication and then disappear. These yōkai began appearing during a period when diseases like cholera were killing people all over the world. Images of protector yōkai that could be used as charms against sicknesses were in high demand. It is very possible that amabie was a sort of copycat yōkai, following the trends of the time.
The origin of the name amabie is a mystery. There is only one record of amabie in existence, and it appears very similar to another yokai with a similar name: amabiko. There are numerous recorded amabiko sightings, and all of them are minor variations on the same theme: a three-legged creature that appears on the water to deliver a prophecy about abundant harvests and disease. Similarly, amabiko instructs people to spread its image around to protect them from the disease. “Amabie” may have been a simple typographical error, or else it may be a regional variation of the amabiko.
LEGENDS: The only recorded sighting of an amabie comes from Higo Province (present-day Kumamoto prefecture) in April of 1846. For some nights in a row, a bright light could be seen in the waters off shore. One night, a government official went out to see to investigate the strange light. When he approached, a strange creature appeared to him. The creature introduced itself as an amabie. It told the government official that a six-year bumper crop was coming. It also said that should there be an outbreak of disease, he should immediately show the amabie’s picture to people everywhere, as it would protect them against harm. After that, the creature returned to the sea. Shortly after, the amabie’s story along with a woodblock print image of it was featured in the newspaper to be distributed to as many people as possible.